The United States’ plans to restock its entire nuclear weapons arsenal, known in military parlance as nuclear “modernization,” hit a bump in the road in January. A scrappy coalition of grassroots watchdog groups and impacted communities from places like the Gullah/Geechee sea islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts and San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods near a weapons laboratory sued the government agency that oversees the security of the US nuclear weapons complex.
The plaintiffs argued that the government was moving ahead with plans to produce new plutonium pits for warheads at plants in rural South Carolina and the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico without properly evaluating alternatives under the National Environmental Policy Act. A federal judge agreed, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) settled with the grassroots groups, agreeing to perform a multi-year environmental analysis.
The extensive environmental impact study is a rare speed bump that everyday Americans have been able to place in the way of the 21st century’s new nuclear arms race — and one that forces the government to hear from locals in the specific communities across the country that produce parts for the weapons.
“A nuclear arms race can feel abstract and distant, but it very much isn’t,” Ravi Garla, a consultant for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told Inkstick. Garla recently worked on a campaign that led to a unanimous vote in the Nevada state legislature to oppose any resumption of explosive nuclear tests at a desert site outside Las Vegas where the government carried out more than 900 tests during and after the Cold War.
“Advocates and activists need to give the arms race a heartbeat, a zip code, to share the human impact, and give it a place and proximity to really connect the story and make it make sense,” Garla added.
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For the NNSA, those zip codes for plutonium pits, in addition to the production sites in South Carolina and New Mexico, include a bomb plant in Kansas City, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, a nuclear storage facility in north Texas called Pantex, and the uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Similar events to address the public were held across Montana last month, during which the Air Force had the awkward assignment of explaining to locals why the missile their towns were expected to host in siloes was hitting speed bumps of their own, those in the form of government cost-cutting mandates and a suspension of silo design and construction work.
The NNSA started to carry out its agreement to listen to Americans’ environmental concerns by hosting two large Zoom meetings in late May, which were just the first form of public consultation that the government has to perform. Neighbors of nuclear sites overwhelmingly opposed the production of new plutonium pits — 68 people spoke out against the move, while only five supported it.
The hearings highlighted how Americans see nuclear weapons production in their backyards: not just as an issue about weapons of mass destruction but also as an industry that produces a litany of quotidian concerns.
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One Montanan asked the Air Force if the housing built to shelter construction workers at Montana missile sites could be permanent rather than temporary in order to become homes for impoverished military veterans.
A labor union in the state expressed its eagerness to be contracted for construction jobs on missile silos. Locals from industry towns across the country sounded the alarm over cancer risks in and around nuclear sites and the government’s procrastination on properly disposing of nuclear waste still leftover from the last century’s arms race. One oil and gas industry envoy representing the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico opposed new plutonium pit production because radioactive spills threaten petrochemical sites.
Other participants raised security concerns, like alarm over earthquake fault lines near nuclear plants and fears that terrorists could attack nuclear waste dumps like the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico. And while some local boosters said they welcomed the influx of a new round of federal spending that would create jobs in towns that largely depend on government contracts, one South Carolinian bemoaned the “economic stigma” that burdens communities downwind from his state’s nuclear weapons plant.
Pete LaBerge, a horse farm owner who lives three miles from the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, told the NNSA he was deeply concerned about the health and safety of SRS workers. The 75-year-old plant produced 40% of the United States’ Cold War-era plutonium, after which the SRS’s reactors were shut down and the plant’s mission transitioned largely to the cleanup of waste from the Cold War. But in recent decades, the government spent billions of dollars on a troubled nuclear fuel plant at the site that never ended up providing power to turn on a single light bulb. Facing backlash over the boondoggle, the Department of Energy (DOE) pulled the plug on it in 2018, and on the very same day announced that it would repurpose the structure for a wholly different use — making plutonium pits for weapons.
LaBerge, who told Inkstick that he routinely sees commercials on the local news recruiting former SRS workers with cancer to sue the DOE, said at the NNSA hearing that he fears that woeful workplace health and safety history will repeat itself.
“A cottage industry of companies and law firms now compete to help [workers] receive up to $400,000 from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and the Energy Employees [Occupational] Illness Compensation [Program] Act,” LaBerge said at the hearing. “What improved radiation reduction and detection methods will be put in place to eliminate these long-term illnesses in plutonium pit production employees?”
LaBerge was one of many speakers who raised alarm over the health risks in nuclear towns. A mother in New Mexico, speaking through tears, described how both her daughter and a neighbor girl developed cancer young.
“In 2022, the little girl next door tried to stand up and fell down. She’d been complaining of pain for a long time, and they realized that she had bone cancer [that] had eaten through her hip bone,” Sayrah Namaste told the NNSA. Within two months, her own daughter was also diagnosed with cancer. The neighbor girl died within a year. “My daughter is still battling cancer in 2025. I don’t want anyone to be exposed to radioactive materials, to carcinogenic materials that could risk their health,” Namaste said.
Namaste’s comment that she didn’t want anyone to face unnecessary radioactive exposure underscored a common complaint among participants in the meetings — that the NNSA agreed to consider alternative plans to produce pits, but refused to analyze a “no action” alternative in which the United States produced no new plutonium pits at all by either reusing any of the approximately 20,000 pits that are in storage facilities in north Texas or making good on its commitments under the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by pursuing a policy of disarmament rather than rearmament.
Glenn Carroll, the coordinator of the Atlanta-based Nuclear Watch South, told Inkstick that laying out the environmental impacts of a “no action” or “disarmament” alternative would be a valuable undertaking for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
“The no-action alternative, or the alternative to the proposed action, would be nuclear disarmament. That’s a real job,” Carroll said. “There’s real fissile material you can’t just walk away from. There’s real radioactive waste you cannot walk away from. So the job of the future is for these agencies and these skilled workers to figure out how to contain this forever.”
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A handful of local proponents also spoke at the NNSA hearings, largely touting plutonium pit production as an economic gain for their towns.
“This project will create thousands of jobs, construction jobs and more than 2,000 permanent positions that will drive and support regional growth,” Daniel Alexander, a councilman from Barnwell County whose district includes a large swatch of SRS, said. Alexander also didn’t believe locals in nuclear towns could influence rearmament policy coming from Washington. “Let’s also be honest with ourselves: This decision to increase and modernize the nuclear stockpile has already been made. The only real question now is where the work gets done and who can do it the right way.”
Remarkably, another backer of plutonium pit production in South Carolina was Robbie Bennett, the president and CEO of the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization. Funded by the DOE, Community Reuse Organizations were created after the Cold War with the mission to help military-industrial towns find economic alternatives to their reliance on nuclear weapons.
Let’s also be honest with ourselves: This decision to increase and modernize the nuclear stockpile has already been made.
The organizations would be a rare, official attempt to promote a “swords into plowshares” economic future for places like rural South Carolina, but the CRO in recent years has, on the contrary, advocated for weapons production at the SRS. “We see [pit production] as an opportunity, an opportunity to continue on a legacy of excellence, an opportunity to bring new jobs, new skills and new investment into our communities,” Bennett told the NNSA.
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However, a native of Aiken, South Carolina, the anchor town closest to the SRS, said the economic benefits from the SRS were not distributed evenly, with communities upriver from the site relatively more prosperous while poorer communities downriver from the SRS are stuck in a trap in which new industries are reluctant to move into a place with a history of contamination.
“They have an economic stigma in terms of attracting new industries because of the presence of Savannah River Site and the waste that is there and the risk of a major accident that still exists there,” Donald Moniak told the hearing.
While the SRS is in a largely rural area, another key node for pit production is within a major metropolitan area.
Outside San Francisco, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and its specialized facility for plutonium research and development sit among residential neighborhoods. “Most of this work would take place in the ‘Superblock,’ which is just a couple hundred yards from suburban houses, city parks, and an elementary school,” Scott Yundt, the executive director of a local watchdog and advocacy group, told the NNSA.
Joanne Sweeney, a grandmother in Georgia, came from an industry family and was unmoved by the argument that pit production would provide welcome jobs in the industry.
“My father worked in the weapons industry to raise seven children and he told me, before he died of cancer, that they thought they were making this world more secure and safer for their children, their nation,” she told the virtual gathering. “And he said, ‘All we have done is pollute the ground. We’re all dying of cancer and heart disease, and if you have a better way, you have my blessing.’”
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Garla, the consultant who worked on the recent campaign against resumed nuclear weapons testing in Nevada, said that when nuclear weapons are such a local and tangible issue — like explosive warhead tests that could cause earthquake-like tremors that threaten high-rises in Las Vegas — a wide variety of people ended up coming together to back the resolution.
Supporters included multiple chambers of commerce, the Nevada Resort Association, which represents casinos, a major labor union, military veterans and the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association. In fact, Garla told Inkstick, no one spoke in opposition to the resolution at its two hearings in the legislature, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers voted unanimously in favor of it.
“We definitely did not know where it would turn out, what concerns or questions there would be, but by building a wide coalition and taking people’s questions seriously, we surprised ourselves each step of the way,” Garla said. “All politics are local.”
Top photo: A billboard by an advocacy group opposed to nuclear weapons testing in Nevada (Courtesy of Nevadans Against Nuclear Weapons Testing)
